


Sandstorm

by MissVioletHunter



Series: The Storm series [2]
Category: Wallander (UK TV)
Genre: Adultery, F/M, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-08
Updated: 2013-11-08
Packaged: 2017-12-31 20:56:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1036297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissVioletHunter/pseuds/MissVioletHunter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Here we go on the Magnus bandwagon again, with another one-shot that picks up several months after Thunderstorm. I felt I had to give the characters a bit of continuity. Along the way I discovered a very enamoured and slightly neurotic Magnus, focused almost to the point of obsession on the events of that stormy night and on the woman that he found and lost. There will be a third part after this one, closing the cycle.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sandstorm

March in Ystad was usually a boring and lazy month, an uneventful not-yet-spring-but-not-completely-winter handful of days. I had just finished a double shift at the station, despite being a Friday, and I was exhausted. However, that didn't keep me from running up the street that lead to the building where my small apartment was, opening the door with trembling fingers and hurrying to the little mailbox that hung on the wall of the lobby. _Magnus Martinsson, 3b_. I held my breath as I opened it, wishing, hoping... and yes, there it was. Exactly like the month before, and the one before that, and the two previous ones. It was March the 19th, and that inconsequential and ordinary day of the month had turned to be a constant, cyclic day of remembrance.

The postcards that had arrived to my mailbox, punctually, on the 19th day of the previous three months had depicted a generic image of the desert. There was no message in them, nothing written apart from my address and a small signature on the reverse of the shiny cardboard rectangle. However, the sight of every one of those three postcards had made my heart shrink a little. I waited for them now, expected them for days like a child on a Christmas morning, checked the mailbox several times too many, even when they always arrived on time. And when they finally did I gazed at them for hours, trying to find solace in the loops and circles of the feminine handwriting and the complicated lines of the signature.

 _V. Hubert._ The surname that I loathed because it reminded me of the man that had taken her away from me. And the name, hidden by a harmless initial, that had been invading my dreams for the last four months.

This one was no different from the others: the desert again, this time at night under a full moon. Nothing written on the back, except for my address, the signature and a time stamp; apparently it took ten days for the post to arrive from Agadir to Ystad. Not bad, considering that we were a continent away and the Moroccan post had a reputation of being painfully slow.

I sat down at the kitchen table, with a mug of coffee in my hand (Christ, why did everything remind me of her, even the fucking coffee?), and tried to make some sense of the situation: Why was she doing this? If she wanted me to follow her there, why not give me some clear sign, an address, a full letter? And if she didn't, what was the purpose of those teasing postcards, why wouldn't she let go?

However, I couldn't bring myself to blame her. Because I hadn't let her go from my mind, either. What had begun on that fateful stormy night as a little game of seduction, a way to release some tension after a hard week, had left in me a mark that I couldn't keep ignoring. I thought of her during the day and dreamed of her at night, like the main character of some stupid romantic comedy... The only problem was, this looked more like a tragedy waiting to happen. She was married, unattainable, and exactly 3.333 kilometers away from me (I had looked it up on the Internet right after the arrival of the first postcard). Every now and then my mind traveled, tracing an imaginary line over Germany, France and Spain, and landing on a white city between the desert and the sea, but I couldn't bring myself to imagine exactly what would happen after that.

I went to my bedroom and put the postcard with the others, safely tucked between the pages of a book that I always kept on my nightstand. Damning the stupid sentimentalism that always got me into more trouble that it was worth, I went back to the living room and turned on the TV. There was news on SVT1, sports on SVT2, and nothing worth mentioning on the rest. I was zapping through channels in a half-drowsy state, trying to find something boring enough to make me sleep, until something on one of the international channels piqued my interest. One of those silly pseudo-documentary shows where rich people who live abroad show their homes to the cameras and gloat about how wonderful it is to live there, usually in some tropical country where only a few privileged bastards own mansions like that. But this particular episode was set in Morocco. No, not just in Morocco. In Agadir. That stupid place where it never rains, where my crazy imagination found solace every so often, searching for the memory of a woman that was becoming less real and more mythic with the passing of time.

Hoping to discover something interesting about the city, I stared at the TV while a buxom American redhead, whose husband was some kind of executive for Coca-Cola, showed the world her two swimming pools, her veranda, her tea room and the _oh so_ _lovely_ view from her front porch. Even the reporter and the cameraman seemed a bit nauseated by the extravagance of the place. This wasn't the kind of story I was looking for, and when the reporter rang the bell of the next house he was visiting I felt almost relieved.

Then the owner of the aforementioned house opened the door, and I choked on my coffee.

In my job, I am used to seeing murdered people, stolen cars, beaten wives every day. I know life is unfair and fate is a son of a bitch. But I wasn't expecting fate to laugh in my face and punch me in the guts out of the blue, and that's exactly what happened then.

_Monsieur Felix Hubert – Retired businessman._

The white letters on the bottom of the screen were followed by the image of the balding, soft-spoken man that I had come to detest so much. I sat upright and turned up the volume of the TV, cursing my very poor knowledge of the French language and mentally thanking the network for the English subtitles.

A porch, a living room, a library and two bedrooms later, I had gone all the way from frantic to hopeless. Felix Hubert was showing the house to the reporter and, despite my aversion to him, I had to admit that deep down he looked like a nice man. He kept the gloating to a minimum, without trying to show false modesty, and his house was tastefully decorated (no doubt by the same feminine hands that inhabited my wettest dreams). But where was she? Was I going to be denied even the little, subsidiary pleasure of seeing her on my TV screen, of knowing that she was happy living the dream of a rich expatriate, even if it meant being thousands of kilometers away from me? No, that would have been an intolerable act of cruelty.

Finally, the reporter opened a door that led to a small drawing room, and there she was. Sitting between several piles of clothing scattered over the desk and chairs, and with an open suitcase at her feet. My mind started racing. Maybe she was going to leave her husband. But in front of a camera? Come on, Magnus… wistful daydreaming is one thing, and having completely absurd hopes is another. I blinked a couple of times to shake away the ramblings of my mind and tried to concentrate on the reporter's words:

_... finally, the lady of the house, who we can see here getting ready for a trip. Business or pleasure?_

_Oh, none of them, really..._

Something was not right. She definitely looked unhappy. She was trying to smile, but when the reporter wasn't looking she got serious again, probably feeling shy or uncomfortable in front of the cameras. Her husband patted her hand and gave her a proud and (to my dismay) affectionate look.

_My wife is a volunteer nurse for _Médecins Sans Frontières_. She's going to spend the next three months working on a refugee camp in Merzouga, in the middle of the desert. And I'm going to miss her a lot, but it's her heart's desire and I can't deny her anything. She'll leave first thing in the morning.  
_

_That's an admirable task, Madame Hubert. Will you be helping the doctors at the camp?_

_Well, I'm not a nurse, not a real one... I wanted to, but unfortunately I never had a chance to finish my studies when I was younger. I'm eager to help if I can, and the situation of the refugees has been critical for years..._

Her husband went on explaining the kind of work she would be doing with MSF while she finished packing some documents and small things from her desk, and then I saw something that would prove to be the final straw to the craziest decision I took in my whole life. She took an object from one of the drawers of the desk and stared at it with longing eyes before putting it delicately in her suitcase, between two sweaters. The reporter, who I could never thank enough if I ever get to meet him, noticed what she was doing and, honoring the inquisitiveness of his profession, asked her about it.

_Are you packing a family portrait, Mme. Hubert? Something to remember your home in the cold desert nights, perhaps?_

_It's just a picture... a landscape. We lived in Sweden for a few months before moving here, and I... I just like taking these little things with me when I travel._

_One of the technicians in my lab took this picture, a couple of weeks before we moved here,_ interrupted her husband. _It was the biggest thunderstorm in decades, right, ma chère? I had never seen a sky like this in all my years in the business! Isn't it amazing?_

He took the picture from his wife's hand and showed it to the camera. It was a night view of Ystad taken from a very tall building, so that the only thing you could see under the sky were the rooftops, but that wasn't the focus of the picture. From the top of the image, a bright bolt of lightning pierced the night in two, giving it an eerie, supernatural look.

She stood behind her husband for a second and snatched the picture back from his hand. And she blushed. I swear to God that I saw her cheeks become alive with a rosy tint and her eyes glaze as she fixed her gaze on some point in the horizon.

Damn. Fuck, damn. I said that loud, several times, to check that I wasn't having one of my crazy daydreams. She remembered me. She... missed me? Was that simple, harmless picture a representation of myself? Was I being carefully packed between her lingerie, shipped away to the desert to keep her company?

The picture found her way back to the suitcase, but right before that she hugged it to her chest. Just for a second. Blink and you'll miss it, and everybody missed it except for me. At the sight of that simple gesture, something snapped in my mind. Even before the program had ended (with a shot of the ever pleasant Felix waving enthusiastically to the camera), I had turned on my laptop and opened the channel's webpage, the Doctors Without Borders website and a couple of travel sites. I was typing like a maniac, as fast as I could, trying very hard not to panic. What if the program had been recorded months in advance? What if she had already gone and returned home again, to her villa in the white city by the sea, to the place where I couldn't follow?

It didn't take me long to find the details of the episode I had just seen and I punched the air out of relief, because the timestamp on the video indicated that it had been recorded just three weeks before.

Sahara Desert, here I come. The Swedish invasion. The most stupid and irrational act of devotion, the one that would prove once and for all if I was mad with love or just plain mad. If fate was playing a macabre joke on me... well, bring it on, you sneaky old bastard. I just couldn't live with the doubt anymore.

The next steps of the project required quite a bit of planning and a cool head (I decided to manage with just the planning, because my head was already a complete mess and definitely not cool). I didn't want Wallander to think that there was a further motive behind my sudden need of a holiday and, of all my colleagues, Anne-Brit was the less likely to question a message from me. With that in mind I sent her what I hoped it was a calm and professional email telling her that I was feeling a bit under the weather, reminding her that I was clearly overworked and had more vacation days left than anyone else at the station, and asking her to check with Wallander if it was okay for me to leave, just for a week or so.

I sat there for half an hour, with the laptop on my knees, drinking so much coffee that I almost could feel my blood turning black, and repeatedly pressing the "refresh" button until a new incoming message appeared.

 _All cleared up with Kurt._ _See you in ten days, Martinsson. Try not to have too much fun. -A. Hoglund.  
_

A sudden wave of fear made the hair on the back of my head stand on end. I was going to spend ten days and an awful load of cash on my own personal version of 'Desperately Seeking Susan', with no guarantee of success. I didn't even know if the MSF camp would be easily reachable, if it would be safe going there, if she would be living in the camp or somewhere else... and how would she react to my unannounced presence.

Those somber thoughts found a small, cozy refuge in my brain, preying on my sanity during the long trip. I drove to the Stockholm-Arlanda airport early the next morning, with an old travel bag containing my passport, too many clothes and too little money. I didn't hate flying, but it made me slightly uncomfortable, especially because my little plan was looking more and more absurd with every passing hour. During my short stop in Düsseldorf to change planes I almost had the impulse to turn back... But back to what? If I couldn't get her out of my head, wouldn't it be better to get a final rejection in person than to pine for her from afar, maybe forever?

I arrived to Agadir late at night, practised my dozen words of French with a cab driver, and went straight to my hotel. After two long flights and several hours of waiting in two different airports, I was so exhausted that I couldn't even think. And that, for once, was good news, because now that I had arrived there I could feel my resolve slowly coming back, and I was going to need all my energy for the trip to the Sahara. There were more than 600 kilometers from the city to the Merzouga camp, and the roads in the desert were little more than trails in the sand. I quickly fell asleep between visions of black eyes, soft lips and passionate love under the palm trees.

My driver and guide for the trip was a scrawny and chatty young man called Mostafa, who fortunately for me spoke a sufficient amount of English. We went all the way through the Draa Valley and into the desert in his old and battered jeep... but that's a tale for another time, and I wasn't exactly interested in the sightseeing aspects of the trip. Suffice to say that when we arrived to our destination it was almost night again.

The camp. I was expecting something like a dirty slum, or a group of tents scattered on the sand, but instead I found a little village, with small sun-dried brick houses and prefabricated shelters standing in orderly lines around a central place where Doctors Without Borders had built two warehouses and a clinic. A group of kids were playing football on one side of the road, and the cool breeze of the dusk drew fantastical shapes among the rivulets of sand. These people might not have running water or electricity, but all in all the place gave a sensation of daily routine and normal life. I was led to the camp manager's office, where I introduced myself as Madame Hubert's cousin, who was vacationing in Agadir and had thought of paying a surprise visit to his dear relative. I'm not exactly a good liar, except under extreme pressure, and my tale was completely preposterous, but the man believed me. Or pretended to believe. Maybe he felt sorry for me, or I may have sounded a bit more desperate than I had anticipated, because the man offered me a warm smile and a cup of mint tea (which I hate, but I accepted it anyway because I needed something to shake away my nerves).

"She should have finished her shift at the clinic by now. I'll show you the way."

There was just a short walk to the area where the volunteers lived, but I almost fainted with excitement during those five minutes. I shoved my hands in my pockets to hide the fact that I was shaking, and not exactly because of the cold. My deranged idea of crossing half a continent on a whim was finally going to be put to test and, after two days and several countries behind me, there was no turning back. I knocked on the door of one of the prefab houses, and a feminine voice (" _Entrez!"_ ) bid me to enter.

It's a curious thing, the way our imagination works. You think 'desert', and your brain immediately gives you back the image of a sensual odalisk, dressed in a white caftan, with her long black hair floating in the wind and a promise of love in her dark eyes. Or maybe it's just my brain the one that works that way. In any case, I wasn't exactly ready to find the woman of my dreams sitting on an old chair, wearing blood-stained scrubs and with her hair wrapped in a wrinkled handkerchief. There were dark circles under her eyes, and the few strands of her hair that had escaped the handkerchief were covered in dust.

To me, she was the most glorious vision ever received by mortal man.

And now I was going to get the answer to the really important question: What would happen when she saw me? I almost expected to hear bitter words of reproach, maybe even a cry of pain or an angry diatribe... But she just stared at me in silence, blinking in the dusky light, not reacting to my presence until I took something from my pocket and put it on the table in front of her. One of her postcards, the last one. The desert at night.

"Hello, Vivianne."

"How... how did you find me?" She asked, still dumbfounded. One of her hands flew to the glossy bit of cardboard. How beautiful they used to be, those hands, white and delicate. Now they looked a bit dry and calloused, with short scrubbed nails, and I felt suddenly angry at the world for inflicting its pains on her delicate frame.

"You called me, and here I am. Although it would have been easier if your instructions had been a bit more precise." My tone demanded an explanation, but it wasn't exactly a reproach, and I mentally kicked myself when I saw her eyes fill up with tears. She got up and walked to the other side of the room, with her back to me. Avoiding me. Damn, was I going to lose all my chances for not being able to shut my fucking mouth?

All I wanted to do was cross the space between us and pull her into my arms, but I just stood there, giving her time. Don't fuck this up, Magnus, or all you'll get will be a bitter rejection and a three thousand kilometers long walk of shame.

After an uncomfortable silence she finally looked at me, and the tears were now running down her face. "Do you know why I came here? Why I volunteered to work at the camp?"

"Not really. Does it have anything to do with me?"

"It has everything to do with you. When I moved to Agadir, I... I couldn't stand living there, doing nothing. It should have been like a permanent holiday, but it was hell. Because every idle moment I thought of you, and I felt guilty. For what I did, for how I was feeling. And Felix... he is the kindest man in the world, and I betrayed him!" Her whole body was shaking with sobs, and I had to clench my fists to dominate the impulse of kissing her tears away, whether she wanted it or not. "For the last three weeks I've buried myself in my work, day and night, hoping to forget, to dull my guilt, to... to be so tired at sundown that I could go to bed and fall asleep without dreaming of you."

"Did it work?"

"No."

That simple word fueled my hopes, and I took a hesitant step towards her. "If you had given me a clear sign, I would have come for you sooner."

"I tried to let you go from my mind. I needed you so much that I had to put a desert between us, and it wasn't enough."

"I wanted you so much that I crossed that desert to find you."

To hell with giving her space, she belonged in my arms and I couldn't wait a second more. I removed the handkerchief from her head, freeing her black, wavy locks to fall down her back, and I dried her tears with a gentle brush of my fingertips. Oh, how I had dreamed about this encounter for months, all those nights spent in the cold, desperate loneliness of my Ystad apartment, missing the warmth of her body and the caress of her mouth.

I ran my hands down her arms, around her waist, up her back and down again, drawing a burning path on her skin. Then I leaned to kiss her, but stopped just a millimeter away from her parted lips, paralyzed by a sudden fear of rejection. What if I had been obsessing over an empty fantasy that belonged in the past? What if it was just her loneliness talking, and not her heart?

"Tell me that you want this, Vivianne", I muttered, close to her ear. "Give me something to hold on to and I will condemn myself for you."

My doubts were quickly dispelled when she tightened her fingers on my chest, running her nails over the fabric of my shirt and finally bringing her lips to mine, and I clung to her embrace like a drowning man to a life raft. I traced her lips with the tip of my tongue, silently asking her to open up to me, and she welcomed me with a soft little moan, letting me nibble at the corner of her mouth before melting fully into mine. I had never kissed anyone like that. So urgent, so needing, as if the only air I could breathe was the one that surrounded her. She had closed her eyes but I couldn't bring myself to do the same, for fear of opening them again and find just the empty air in front of me. I had to drink her in with all my senses, fill the void in my heart with her presence after all the endless, hopeless wait.

Any shrink in the world would have been overjoyed to analyze the mountain of obsessions that I had been nursing since our first encounter. Every word she spoke on that fateful stormy night was tattooed forever in my brain. Every part of her body had been the object of my adoration, first from the distance and now, finally, in the flesh. Her neck was one of those obsessions of mine, a glorious column that I ravished hungrily with warm, wet kisses, lingering on the softness of her skin like cream. No, darker than cream. Peach? Is that even a color...? I felt my head spin a little, as if her taste was making me tipsy, and with my lips I drew a path from chin to collarbone, nipping ever so slightly, letting the sound of her moans mark my comings and goings.

Looking around me, I scoured the dimly lit room and saw that the sleeping space consisted in a battered bunk bed. Only the bottom bed had a mattress and its springs creaked when I lay her down on it, making me fear that it would collapse under our weight. Well, to hell with romantic settings, too. This was nothing like my daydreams, but it didn't matter. After four months of relying on my imagination and my right hand I was as eager as a teenager on his first night with his girlfriend, and teenagers don't care if they're on a bed or against the wall (not an option in this case; the walls of a prefab house are practically like cardboard... bad idea).

The wind started howling outside, blowing dust and sand against the window of the tiny room. I don't even remember how I got rid of my clothes, but they were soon scattered on the floor. Vivianne had positioned herself on top, straddling me, allowing me to tear her scrubs off, to worship every inch of her skin with my hands and my mouth. I slipped her shirt from her shoulders, bringing my mouth to one of them and taking a bit of her soft, round flesh between my teeth. Her delicious moans vibrated against my lips, encouraging me further. I unclasped her bra with shaky hands and cupped her breasts, roughly, twirling her nipples between my fingers until she threw her head back and cried out my name. Then I felt a trail of kisses slide down my body, her hands and mouth inching towards my erection. She stopped there for a moment, wetting her lips, making sure that she had all my attention before starting a sweet torture of slow strokes of my flesh and tickling licks around my inner thigh.

I was dying for her to take me fully in her mouth, but she kept teasing me with the licking. Christ, was she going to torment me forever? Around the head, down the sides, making me gasp and grunt until she finally started a slow, torturous up-and-down movement of her lips on my shaft. Like a caged beast I growled, my hands grabbing fistfuls of the sheet beneath me and twisting it so hard that I almost teared it in two.

I asked her... begged her to stop, something I had never done with any other woman. I needed to be inside her, to feel her body writhing under me, to fully share with her the pleasure and the pain of our _amour fou_.

The only thing she was wearing now were light yellow knickers that made a wonderful contrast with her skin. Taking mental note of my new favorite color, I slid the tiny bit of cotton fabric down her thighs while she guided my hand to her wet heat, encouraging me to explore, to touch, to make her mine.

The time for gentleness had passed. I shifted on the bed until I was on top of her and claimed her mouth in a messy, demanding kiss. Without warning I slid two fingers inside her and her hips bucked forward, pressing hard into my palm as I circled her sensitive nub with my thumb. Now it was her turn to beg, to whimper and plead for more. And more I gave her, raking my teeth over her nipples while my fingers kept playing with her wet folds. Her moans turned into breathy cries and I finally removed my hand and entered her. It was like being wrapped in silk, in liquid heat, and every time her hips met mine I fell into the deep pit of desire that I had missed so much.

Vivianne, Vivianne! My mind had been emptied of all rational thought except for her name. My beauty, my life, my obsession. I bent my head to press a row of kisses on the curve of her shoulder, feeling her hair brush against my cheek and her soft wetness clenching around me. Then she latched her lips to my neck and I lost all sanity. I was sent over the edge, crashing into oblivion, exploding and collapsing between her thighs.

When her body slumped in my arms I rolled onto my side, not wanting to let go of her embrace. She kissed my lips, the tip of my nose, the palm of my hand, her contact soft and light like a feather, and a moment later I felt her breathing calmly against my chest, falling asleep in my arms.

A feeling of uneasiness chose that ill-judged moment to start nagging at my brain. Would she run from me again in the morning, regret what we had done? Would her fear and guilt return with renewed force because of my carelessness? Outside, the wind had stopped and the night was completely quiet. I looked at the sleeping woman beside me and shook those gloomy thoughts away. In the morning I would think of something, wait for her if I had to, talk her out of her loveless marriage and make her understand that she belonged with me.

But for now, we were no longer apart. Here in the desert, in this perfect moment, she was mine again.


End file.
